


Remember the Monsters

by Miss_M



Category: Alien Quadrilogy (Movies), Alien Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character meets a younger version of their love interest, F/M, Fix-It, Implied Body Horror, POV switch, Sexual Content, Time Travel, Uncontrollable Spontaneous Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-15 08:42:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28560759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: Every time Hicks encountered her, she had the same message for him.Diverges from canon inAlien 3.
Relationships: Dwayne Hicks/Ellen Ripley
Comments: 12
Kudos: 21
Collections: Past Imperfect Future Unknown 2020





	Remember the Monsters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Missy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/gifts).



_Earth_

When Dwayne was eight years old, a woman stole him from the supermarket. 

She didn’t take him far – just to the ice cream place next door, where she bought him two scoops and talked to him for a few minutes, before she clutched her stomach and ran to the bathroom. When Dwayne’s mom and the supermarket security guard showed up a minute later, the windowless bathroom was empty, the woman hadn’t walked out past the counter and the booths, and Dwayne hadn’t even finished his ice cream. His mom was crying and clutched him to her chest really hard, so he understood that he should’ve been scared, but he wasn’t. The woman had known his name and everything.

“She told me about an alien,” he told his mom. “It’s eight feet tall, has acid for blood, and it _eats people_.”

His mom didn’t seem to find this very cool. “That’s horrible! Why would she say that to you? Who was she?”

Dwayne shrugged. He wondered if he could persuade Mom to buy him another scoop. He was never allowed that much ice cream at home, but this was a different situation. “Dunno. She said she was sorry to do it like this, but she couldn’t think of a better way. She was sweating a lot. I asked her if she was sick, and she smiled and said ‘something like that.’ I hope she’s okay.”

His mom didn’t hope the woman was okay – on the contrary. By that point, a cop had joined them. Dwayne got quiet when he saw the cop’s expression as he took down what the lady had told Dwayne. 

“She say anything else, son?” the cop said. 

Dwayne looked at the table and shook his head. They didn’t believe him, so why should he tell them anything else?

His mom put her arm around his shoulders. “Dwayne. Tell the officer if there’s anything else.”

Dwayne scraped his spoon around his empty bowl. If the adults’ backs had been turned, he’d have licked the bowl, to make sure no ice cream got left. “She told me to remember the monsters. She said it was real important.” He closed his eyes so he could concentrate better on the memory: the woman’s pale, sweaty face, her serious expression. If it was important, he wanted to get it right. “Yeah, that’s it. ‘Remember the monsters.’”

_Delta Station_

“This is some bullshit, man,” Singh bitched even though they weren’t supposed to talk on guard duty. “Full goddamn mess hall, they nab us to guard the sick bay. What the fuck’s up with that?”

“Must be someone important,” Hicks replied, staring at the hallway wall opposite, trying not to move his lips too much. He was a Marine Corps Private now and liked going by his last name.

He shouldn’t have, but he glanced over his shoulder real quick, just a peek through the viewport on the sick bay door: white room, window with a view of the station’s axis against the black, someone tall and pale in a hospital gown sitting hunched over on the bed. 

The someone looked up, and Hicks clocked only that it was a woman before he whipped his head back around to stare at the wall. Shit. A month out of basic goddamn training, and he was already getting caught breaking regs. 

The hollow sound of something slamming against the viewport made both he and Singh flinch. Some Marines they were…

“Hey!” The woman’s voice was muffled by the thick glass. Hicks wished she’d go away. She kept pounding the glass with her palm. “Dwayne! I need to talk to you.”

“The fuck, man?” Singh mouthed at him. 

Hicks was sweating under his fatigues. Now she was hitting the viewport with her fist and hollering his name loudly enough that you could hear her clearly in the hallway, even through the door. 

“Dwayne! Get in here!”

She might keep going for who knew how long, and Hicks figured he could take her if she got violent. He glanced up and down the empty hallway.

“Goddamn it,” he muttered. “If anyone comes by, tell ‘em she was tearing up the room, I went in to restrain her.”

“No, wait…”

For a moment when the sick bay door slid open, Singh’s furious argument and the woman’s yelling filled Hicks’ head like a dust storm, then the door shut off Singh’s voice and the woman fell silent too. Hicks wondered if she was military: she’d had a buzz cut a while back, but her bearing was too loose. Beads of sweat stood out on her forehead. 

“Dwayne.”

She said his name and looked at him like she knew him. 

“Ma’am, why don’t you get back into bed? I can call a med-tech for you.”

Her expression hardened. “We’ve fucked twice, don’t you give me that anodyne bullshit. Do you remember me? Do you know who I am?” 

Hicks’ jaw dropped. He could feel his face heating up. The drill instructor told them at the end of basic, “you’re Marines now, but you ain’t men yet,” and Hicks had never felt that so hard as face to face with this woman looking at him like he owed her something.

Her eyes flicked from his face to the insignia on his sleeve. “Shit, you’re still just a private. How old are you?”

“N…” He cleared his throat. “Nineteen, ma’am.”

Her shoulders slumped, and she sat down on the bed, looking dead tired. “Damn it. It’s too early, you won’t be posted to Gateway Station for another decade.” She rubbed her hands together, like she was nervous about something. “Sorry if I startled you. Your virtue’s safe from me.”

He could have turned around and gone back to his post, let her scream and carry on all she liked. Not his problem. But something about her – the angle of her jaw, the look on her face, like she was trying to work out a problem and didn’t like her odds of finding a solution – made him step closer. “Do you need something, ma’am? Only I don’t think we’ve met.”

She stared at him, and he was just starting to think he should’ve left when he’d had the chance, when she replied: “We’ve met. I have to ask you something now, and I want you to think really hard about your answer, even if it makes you feel like you’re going nuts.” 

She cocked her head and said his name in a way that went straight to his gut, like she really did know him. 

“Dwayne Hicks, do you remember me telling you a story about monsters?”

A hot day outside, but the fans in the ice cream parlor made it nice and cool. His mom freaking out, and him, a proper little shit, just wanting more ice cream. And a woman with very short hair and a sweaty face, telling him about…

Singh banged his hand against the viewport, and Hicks realized he was leaning in close to the woman. He started away from her. She kept staring at him so intently, like she was about to unhinge her jaw and swallow him whole. 

Singh gestured wildly for Hicks to get his ass back outside. The woman sighed and waved him away, and Hicks, feeling oddly reluctant to get out of crazytown, trotted to the door.

“I’ll see you around,” the woman told his retreating back. “Just don’t forget what I said.”

She made no more noise once he was back at his post and got Singh to shut up about his having gone inside. When they were relieved two hours later, Hicks stole a last glance through the viewport: the woman lay on the bed facing the window, clutching her stomach, the knobs of her spine visible through the slit in her hospital gown. Vulnerable like an exposed wound.

“The fuck you care?” Sarge told him the next day, when he tried to inquire after the patient he and Singh had guarded. “First rule of life in the Corps, son: don’t mind other people’s business. You looking for something to occupy your brain? I got a dirty latrine with your name on it.” 

_New Eden_

The crackle of electricity on his left, ozone and the smell of hot metal thick in his nostrils. Up ahead, the lip of his trench crumbled from a direct hit, dirt raining down.

Hicks dropped down and covered his head, in case the trench caved in, then twisted to his right to get away from whatever was causing that electrical discharge. There was a woman beside him who hadn’t been there a moment ago: no helmet, no weapon, no body armor. Her profile by the light of the flares arcing over their position – a picture of shock, her mouth wide open. 

Hicks grabbed her arm when she started to roll to her feet, gasping and clutching her midriff, her elbow pushing against the trench wall. 

“Stay down! Where’s your weapon?”

Her eyes focused on him, and he nearly dropped his pulse rifle. “Hicks,” she gasped. “Dwayne.”

“What the fuck…” Her face. Even in the flare-lit shadows, he knew her face.

Clumps of earth pelted them from above, and he covered the woman’s body on instinct. She clutched at his arm, gasping in his ear, spitting dirt on his cheek. 

In the lull till the next blast, he raised his head. She touched him, her fingers light on his cheekbone. A tear rolled down the mud smeared on her cheek. 

“Your face,” she breathed. Pulse blasts echoed up and down the trench, and this woman was touching him like they’d rolled out of bed five minutes ago.

Abruptly her hand fell away from his face. She tugged on his sleeve, twisted it to check his insignia. “What year is this?” she barked at him, all her knowing tenderness gone.

He blinked. “2176. I know you.”

She laughed the grimmest laugh he’d ever heard. “Not yet, you don’t. Not really.” 

She craned her neck for a look around, Hicks still on top of her. 

“Bug-hunt?” she asked.

“Colonial rebellion. Piece of cake.”

The trench gave way about twenty yards down, burying Shimizu and Cole. 

“Doesn’t look much like cake to me,” the woman said dryly while Hicks rolled off of her, cursing, kept low, and ran to help dig them out. 

By the time he could look around, she was sitting up against the trench wall, running her hands over her midriff, like she was checking herself for a broken rib. She grimaced, and Hicks picked up speed to check on her. 

He dropped to his knees by her side and reached into his pouch for his med kit. “You hit?”

“No. Ahhhh.” Breath hissing between her teeth. He could tell it cost her to focus her gaze on him. A tiny blue lightning bolt danced on the ground alongside her leg. 

Her hand was a vise on his bicep. “Listen to me,” she said. “I don’t know what’s happening. But I’ll find you if I can. Just remember…”

“I remember.” Blue electricity flickered all over her, stinging Hicks’ hands where they touched her, trying to lift her shirt and check her for injury. Their eyes met. He started to say: “… the monsters…” 

“Monsters,” she said faintly and vanished. The scent of ozone and metal, and just an empty stretch of dirt wall in front of him. 

He grabbed a passing body: Soto. “Did you see that?”

Soto shook him off. “See what? We’ve got incoming.”

_Bernice 378_

Her hair was the longest he’d ever seen it: still short, but not like a soldier’s. More like she hadn’t seen a pair of clippers in a while. She didn’t look too good: pale and sweaty, with champion dark circles under her eyes. 

“You look worse than I feel,” he told her with a smile when she sat on the end of his hospital bed. 

“You’d be a sight too if you had a monster growing inside you.”

His face fell. And here they were just starting to get easy with each other. “Come again?”

She settled herself comfortably, though he noticed she was careful not to bend over or otherwise put pressure on her midriff. 

“How are you feeling?” she asked him.

“Couple of pulse hits and the best care the Marine Corps has to offer, I’ll be fine. You wanna quit stalling and backtrack now?”

She watched him closely, like she was gauging if he’d believe the whole story. “They have a silicon exoskeleton and acidic blood, use mammalian organisms as incubators, rip them open coming out. Best I could figure out: metal and acid, plus my DNA, combined with a high-heat, high-pressure environment, must have started a chain reaction, ripped a hole in the continuum. Sent me ping-ponging around your timeline. And you can’t tear the same ticket off a roll twice. I’ve never visited you twice at any one time, it’s always a new part of your life. Well, new to me.” She patted her sternum. “As to this, that thing’s still inside me. If I don’t figure this out, sooner or later I’ll run out of raffle tickets and it’ll rip me apart when it comes out.”

“Jesus.”

The corners of her mouth twitched. “Or something. I didn’t mention the chest-bursting part when you were a kid. I needed you impressed enough to remember, not traumatized.”

“Uh, yeah, thanks. Why me? We haven’t officially met.”

Her tiny smile grew fractionally. “There was some of your DNA in me too. When we do meet officially, or did meet in my timeline, there was, ah, call it a moment. High stress situation, a little privacy. Shake and pour.”

“Right.” It didn’t _seem_ right, not really. Not the fucks he couldn’t remember because he hadn’t experienced them yet, not his having zero chance of catching up while she kept popping up all over and knowing everything that would happen, and definitely not the part about the time bomb ticking away inside her. “So now what?”

She cocked her head at him. “Are you a corporal yet?”

Goddamn… this was exactly what he meant! She knew all this shit before it had even happened to him. Tamping down his irritation, Hicks nodded. 

_That_ put a spark in her eye. Almost made up for his feeling like he was literally a day late and a buck short. 

“Soon you’ll transfer to a new squad out of Gateway Station. Your squadmates will be Hudson, Vasquez, Drake, Sergeant Apone. You need to convince them that when you all meet me, they have to do as I say, even if it contradicts orders from above. Especially orders from the Company.” 

Judging by her sour expression, he’d have known she had even more reason to hate Wey-Yu than most people, even if he hadn’t figured the Company had something to do with her troubles. He didn’t share her confidence about his aptitude for psych warfare, but it was nice for someone to have such faith in him.

“And that will fix the…” He waved his hand at her, her sternum, her temporary – temporal – presence on his bed.

Her left shoulder lifted, fell. “I honestly have no idea. The most important thing is to kill off those things before they can spread.”

Hicks considered arguing that both her survival and destroying the monsters were important, but he was starting to recognize her set expression: no arguments brooked. 

She lifted her head, frowning, her whole body tensing up, then Hicks noticed it too: the smell of ozone.

“It’s just the rain in the garden,” he told her, watched her expression turn less wild, almost embarrassed. “They keep the windows open, supposed to help convalescence.”

She wouldn’t meet his eye. “It’s hard to predict how long it’ll be before I get yanked out. It varies.” 

Hicks had noticed. “Want to play cards while we wait? I’ve fleeced everyone else on this ward, and you look like you have a pretty good poker face.”

She grinned. “I’ll remember how much you owe me, whenever I see you next.”

She vanished halfway through the first hand, and only then did Hicks realize he’d forgotten to ask her her name. 

_Earth_

“What the fuck is this?” she snarled, staring around the bar near the space docks like she’d never seen its like before.

Hicks shrugged. “Shore leave. I ship out to Gateway Station tomorrow.”

She turned her head from inspecting the bar to inspect him with evident distaste. She looked a lot better than the last time he’d seen her – this visit must have been earlier for her. 

He laughed. “Hey, I don’t control your hopping around anymore than you do. Since you’re here now, how about a drink?”

He could practically hear the cogs turning in her head while he waved a droid over and got her a beer. She frowned at the brown bottle and at Hicks. “I don’t remember explaining all this to you. I’m still figuring it out myself.”

“Hasn’t happened for you yet.” He wanted to laugh again at her deepening frown, camouflaged it with a swig of his beer. She wasn’t enjoying being wrong-footed any more than he enjoyed having her weave in and out of his life without warning. “Want to dance?”

At least she stopped frowning and raised an eyebrow. “To this noise?”

“Best you’ll find around here.” Hicks slid off his barstool and held out his hand to her. “Come on, one for the road. We’re almost at the end of whatever your plan is once I get to Gateway.”

She eyed him, put down her beer, and brushed past him on her way to the door. The stab of rejection had barely started to register when he heard her murmur in passing: “I have a better idea.”

Hicks had seen nicer alleys behind dockside bars, but not that many. She leaned back against the brick wall, unbuttoned her pants, grabbed his wrist, and shoved his hand inside. Pressing in close, he tongued at the sweat-salty skin under her ear, her short hair tickling his nose. He worked her with his fingers, and she unzipped and fisted him, biting her lip and riding his hand frantically like she’d gone without for ages – and maybe she had – but he didn’t dare kiss her. He didn’t know why. It didn’t seem like the right time, and _that_ thought almost made him laugh and ruin this. To cover for it, he whispered in her ear: “Pull down your pants.”

She made an _unh-huh_ noise, her long throat exposed as she chased her high, and shook her head. “Your DNA set me on this road. I don’t know what it might do now.”

She twisted away from the wall, away from him, but she didn’t run. She did push her pants down to her knees, then faced away from him and squeezed her thighs together. Reading her loud and clear, Hicks crowded up to her and pushed up between her slick thighs, which clamped tightly around him. He humped hard and kept fingering her. She pressed her palms against the rough brick and moaned and slapped her bare thighs to his, the friction of him so close to her core, till she bucked and thrashed and got him off too, all over her thighs and the wall. 

Holding himself up with his hand splayed next to hers on the wall, he put his mouth to her ear. “You haven’t told me your name.”

“I did.” She caught her breath, laughed. “In my timeline. My manners have gone to hell since this whole thing started. It’s Ellen. Ellen Ripley.”

Hicks kissed her neck, felt her shiver, and held her close with his arm around her waist, hoping the smell of ozone and the electrical discharge wouldn’t leave him alone in this alley, pants down like a rube who just got rolled on his first trip to the city.

_LV-426_

“Remember the monsters I told you about?” Dwayne shouted at his squad. “And the woman who’d tell us what needed doing? Well, this is it.”

“Aw, not the goddamn monsters again,” Hudson yelled back. “I’m sick of that shit, man.”

“Why should we listen to Snow White anyway?” Vasquez chimed in, eyeing Ripley like she gave herself good odds if it came to a fight.

“Because the blood draining from all of your faces suggests Corporal Hicks is one hell of a salesman,” Ripley said. “Because you saw my CAT scan. And because you know the Company’s lying to you about this being a search and rescue mission. The aerial scan showed no signs of mammalian life down on that rock. There’s no one to search for.” She caught her breath, her throat tightening. “There’s no one,” she murmured. 

“Ma’am,” Sergean Apone said, nearly chewing clean through his cigar, “while I’ll allow that Corporal Hicks has a bright future as a yarn-spinner, you’re asking us to countermand a direct order and nuke an inhabited world from orbit. We’re Marines. We don’t do that kind of shit.”

“I’m asking you to make a choice,” Ripley replied. “You can extrapolate from all the available data and decide whether you trust this man’s judgment.” She nodded at Dwayne. “The alternative is you all dying for a pack of lies and those things spreading all over the galaxy. Your move.”

The standoff was intense but brief, and in the end, their shared dislike of Wey-Yu carried the day more than Hicks’ persuasion or Ripley’s cool browbeating. Hudson kept bitching that he had four more weeks till his discharge and now he’d get four to forty in the brig, but the others told him to shut up and get on with it. 

Leaning against a viewport, Ripley watched the mushroom cloud bloom on the surface of LV-426, swiped at her eyes angrily. _I’m sorry, Newt_ , she thought. The aerial scan might have been accurate, or it might have missed one tiny mammal hiding under several layers of metal construction, but either way it wasn’t even a question – Ripley knew how the story went in the other timeline, and she hadn’t gone through all this toil and trouble for that to play out again. 

A tearing pain in her abdomen brought her to her knees. Dwayne was at her side at once, holding her up, calling the medic.

“We need to freeze her then cut her open. I’ll talk you through it.” Dwayne relayed her instructions while they laid her on a stretcher, Hudson holding up one end of it and Drake the other. 

“Who’s the medic?” Ripley slurred through the pain.

Hudson raised his hand and nearly tipped her onto the floor. 

“Great,” Ripley said amid the cacophony of his squadmates praising Hudson’s intelligence, while they humped the stretcher into the infirmary. “Just be quick about it, and remember…”

“… burn the thing in the incinerator, I remember.” Dwayne tried to touch her hand, but the lid of the cryo-tube descended over Ripley. He tapped on the glass. “Hey, you owe me a dance.”

Ripley smiled. Through the miasma of the anesthetic, the agony in her abdomen, and the muffled sound of Hudson and Vasquez giving Dwayne shit, she managed to say: “Let me get my beauty sleep first,” before she tumbled in zero G and slipped into darkness.

**Author's Note:**

> For Ripley, the order of their meetings is: New Eden, Earth (when Hicks is a child), Earth (at the bar), Delta Station, Bernice 378, LV-426.


End file.
